by Eric Rutkow
Consumption likely peaked around 1880, when railroads consumed 60 million ties (about 2 billion board feet) for new construction and repairs of worn-out track.
Unlike the other wood-based aspects of the railroads, wooden ties never lost their ground to newer technologies. More than twenty-five hundred different patents for ties were introduced, but none effectively replaced the combination of strength, durability, and cost savings that wood provided. In the late nineteenth century, railroads began to use preservatives such as creosote to extend the life of wooden ties, further enhancing their utility—this practice also tempered the rate of forest depletion.
Even relatively early on in the development of the railroad, the impact that trains had on the nation’s trees was difficult for some to ignore. In 1854, Thoreau in Walden addressed the situation with typical passion: “That devilish Iron Horse, whose ear-rending neigh is heard throughout the town, has muddied the Boiling Spring with his foot, and he it is that has browsed off all the woods on Walden shore.” Within a decade, the scene in Concord was repeated across forests throughout the nation as the railroad expanded its network. Andrew Fuller, one of the earliest voices urging the railroads to remedy their destructive practices, wrote in 1866: “Even where railroads have penetrated regions abundantly supplied, we soon find that all along its track timber soon becomes scarce. For every railroad in the country requires a continued forest from one end to the other of its lines to supply it with ties, fuel, and lumber for building their cars.”
Most Americans, however, turned a blind eye to the depletion situation, focusing instead on the new prosperity that railroads seemed to promise. Trains allowed for fast and easy transport of goods and integrated small communities into the trading spheres of large cities. They also opened up new regions for settlement, especially in the Midwest. The laying down of railroad tracks was often the first step toward any region’s economic development, and construction booms followed the ever-growing network.
The increased construction rates that railroads brought about also created a more intense demand for lumber generally. No new houses could be built without timber for framing. No new farms begun without wooden storage barns. No animals raised without wooden fences. Progress required billions of board feet, and a quickening pace of life was producing a quickening pace of lumbering.
The Lumber Baron and Industrial Logging
IN JULY 1852, eighteen-year-old Frederick Weyerhaeuser landed in New York after a six-week voyage from his hometown of Nieder Saulheim, Germany. Other members of his family had already settled near Erie, Pennsylvania, and Weyerhaeuser joined them there, soon finding work with a local brewer. Though the young immigrant had no formal education past age twelve, he was a fast learner. He mastered the brewing business thoroughly, but abandoned it when, as he later explained, he “saw how often brewers became confirmed drunkards.” Vice and indolence were intolerable to Weyerhaeuser, who showed little interest in leisure activities. By age twenty-one, the industrious German had earned enough money to set out on his own and, like many immigrants at midcentury, decided to head further west.
In early March 1856, he arrived at Rock Island, Illinois, a young, bustling town on the banks of the Mississippi River. With access to the nation’s most important commercial watercourse and a recently completed railroad to Chicago, Rock Island offered new settlers plenty of opportunities. Germans, in particular, had flocked to the town, and they provided a social community for Weyerhaeuser. But his limited funds, poor education, and heavily accented English forced him to accept whatever work he could find. He began doing mechanical repairs and odd jobs for the railroad, though, in his own words, “the work didn’t suit [him].” He wanted to focus instead on the commercial aspects of business.
Several months after Weyerhaeuser arrived in Rock Island, one of his friends offered him a position as the night fireman for a local sawmill. This new job seemed no more promising than the railway work, but Weyerhaeuser still accepted the employment, “expecting to learn to run the engine,” he later explained. The work, however, shifted almost immediately from mechanics to lumber counting and sorting, tasks that suited Weyerhaeuser well. He was promoted to lumber salesman after making an unsupervised deal that netted his firm sixty dollars in gold and earned him the mill owner’s approval. From there, his position within the firm improved steadily. “The secret of this,” Weyerhaeuser wrote with characteristic humility, “lay simply in my readiness to work. I never counted the hours.” During this period, Weyerhaeuser supplemented his income from the firm with investments and business arrangements throughout Rock Island and the neighboring towns.
By 1858, he was doing well financially but the sawmill that employed him was not. The Panic of 1857 had greatly weakened its financial position, and it went broke when an unscrupulous lumber dealer fleeced the mill owners of a shipment that they had purchased on credit. Weyerhaeuser, who had mastered the lumber industry’s commercial side, decided that the bankrupted mill was a worthwhile investment, and in a move that would be characteristic of his career, he sought out a partner to share the financial burden and spread the risk. The man he selected, F. C. A. Denkmann, was a German immigrant who ran a grocery store in Rock Island and had a reputation as a good machinist, the skill that Weyerhaeuser lacked; additionally, Denkmann was married to the sister of Sarah Elizabeth Bloedel, a woman whom Weyerhaeuser was courting and would later marry. The two men pooled their capital and purchased the mill property for about four thousand dollars. Weyerhaeuser now owned a sawmill, the first piece in an empire that would change the lumber industry, and with it the nation.
IN AMERICA, ESPECIALLY in the North, lumber meant white pine. The same trees that had once provided masts for the British navy also produced a timber that farmers and builders prized above all others. The durable pinewood resisted cracking, decay, shrinking, splintering, and warping. It not only held glue, paint, and varnish well but also gripped nails firmly, even when they’d been removed and replaced in the same hole. And unlike logs cut from hardwoods, those from white pines floated easily upon water, an invaluable quality in a young nation where rivers functioned as commercial highways.
Transporting pine logs downriver generally took one of two forms. In some cases, especially on the more easily navigable rivers, men bound the newly cut wood into rafts. Skilled pilots guided these cumbersome objects through a river’s eddies, islands, and shallows, under its bridges and over its rapids until they reached the mill. In other cases, logs were dumped directly into the rivers, a practice that became popular during the nineteenth century and was known as log driving. Here, loggers waited for the arrival of the spring, when the freshets swelled every stream, and they pushed the entire winter season’s cutting into the flow. Countless thousands of logs, typically branded with a unique mark to distinguish them, tumbled and crashed over one another as they wound their way toward the local sawmills. The processing centers then stopped the logs with booms (floating barriers that could be employed to divert the wood from its downriver course). The term “logjam” originated with these drives: Occasionally, logs got trapped or wedged against objects in the river, setting off a chain reaction that could pile up fresh lumber for miles.
The nation’s logging industry originated in the forests of Maine and New Hampshire, where some of the densest commercial white pine stands surrounded mighty rivers like the Piscataqua. New England’s network of rivers carried logs toward Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and other coastal outlets, destined for colonial cities or for export.
As the population moved deeper into the nation’s interior forests, so did the North’s logging network, following a patchy distribution of white pines that extended across much of New York State and northern Pennsylvania. The pioneers carving new lives from the backwoods in these regions were also shipping timbers downriver to cities whose wood-hungry populations were booming in the early nineteenth century. Logs followed the Hudson River to New York City, the Delaware River to Philadelphia, the Susquehanna
system all the way to Baltimore, and the Allegheny and Ohio Rivers, which flowed westward, to Pittsburgh and Cincinnati.
Eventually, New York State supplanted Maine as the nation’s premier supplier of timber. By 1839, it accounted for 30 percent of the nation’s total lumber production by value, with much of it passing through Albany, the country’s largest wholesale distribution center. Maine followed New York with about 14 percent, while the other New England states boasted 10 percent and Pennsylvania added roughly 9 percent. Thus, this northeastern white pine belt composed almost two-thirds of the commercial lumber produced in the entire nation that year, an estimated 1.6 billion board feet—this number, however, ignored much of the noncommercial output that farmers generated in clearing their land for agriculture.
Around this time, lumber production rates started to rise rapidly, largely in response to new technologies and improved techniques. In the mills, steam-powered engines began to replace waterwheels, and engineers improved the power and efficiency of the innumerable waterwheels that remained. Cutting saws also benefited from advances in engineering, as well as in metallurgy. The most powerful saw in the first half of the nineteenth century was the muley, a long, stiff blade held by clamps and guided by rails that cut between 5,000 and 8,000 board feet per day. By midcentury, mills began shifting to both steam-powered circular saws (toothed disks that spun rapidly) and gang saws (multiple blades that cut a single board instantaneously into inch-thick planks). Each of these was capable of producing more than 40,000 board feet a day. The sawmills slowly grew from one- or two-man operations to large factories that employed up to one hundred men.
The nation’s annual timber cut—which, over the first forty years of the nineteenth century, had gradually grown by one billion board feet—started to increase that amount or more almost every year after 1840. By midcentury, lumbering was the nation’s second-largest manufacturing industry, trailing flour and grist, but besting cotton, cloth, wools, leather, liquor, and slaughtering.
The industry’s turn to higher production also coincided with a shift toward midwestern markets. Though demand in the East remained high, it was growing exponentially along the Mississippi River and across the prairies. Waves of immigrants and new settlers flooded these regions in search of inexpensive, fertile land. This new terrain lacked the dense forests that blanketed much of the eastern United States, which meant that farming could begin immediately but that there were no nearby woodlots to provide material for houses, barns, fences, and tools. Timber ceased being a resource free for the cutting and became a commodity imported from afar. Adding to this demand were the enormous requirements of the railroad network that was making much of this westward expansion possible. The viability of towns like Rock Island depended upon a steady supply of trees that the local environment lacked.
The solution to this geographical imbalance lay far to the north of Rock Island and the countless other towns that dotted the Mississippi River and the prairies. Some of the richest white pine forests in the nation occupied a vast, pristine swath of forest that stretched over much of Michigan, northern Wisconsin, and parts of Minnesota. These three states, known collectively as the Lake States, also contained a high proportion of navigable rivers and lakes for bringing the white pine logs to market. As a sanguine congressman explained in 1852, “Upon the rivers which are tributary to the Mississippi, and also those which empty themselves into Lake Michigan, there are interminable forests of pine, sufficient to supply all the wants of the citizens . . . for all time to come.” The amount of commercial pine available totaled hundreds of billions of board feet.
Lumbermen from the East began to resettle in the Lake States, bringing with them the techniques of commercial logging. The exodus was, perhaps, most noticeable in Maine, where many of the choicest pine stands that had once seemed infinite were nearing exhaustion. A congressman from that state in 1852 lamented “the stalwart sons of Maine marching away by the scores and hundreds to the piny [sic] woods of the Northwest.”
Lake States pine typically followed two paths to market. Trees growing along streams that emptied out into Lakes Michigan and Superior—an area that included most of Michigan, northeastern Wisconsin, and northern Minnesota—wound up in Milwaukee or, more likely, Chicago. From there, logs could travel eastward through a recently completed canal system and ultimately reach the Atlantic Ocean. In 1856, Chicago, which had sprung up seemingly overnight as a center for both railroad traffic and lumber distribution, displaced Albany as the nation’s largest wholesale processing center. The other main artery of Lake States commerce was the Mississippi River. Streams originating far north in Wisconsin and Minnesota wandered southward and eventually emptied into the great river. Upon reaching the Mississippi, logs floating on giant rafts, each containing hundreds of thousands of board feet, could travel as far south as New Orleans and the Gulf of Mexico, passing towns like Rock Island en route.
By 1860, the Lake States lumber trade was supplanting the northeastern pine belt as the nation’s largest supply region, but the real growth was only beginning.
WEYERHAEUSER HAD SPENT much of the 1860s working with Denkmann to improve their sawmill. They invested in the new technologies that had begun to appear around midcentury, and their mill’s capacity, which was initially between 6,000 and 10,000 board feet a day, doubled within two years and jumped to more than 200,000 feet of lumber per week by the late 1860s. The local paper described it in 1869 as “one of the best lumbering establishments on the river” that contained “a perfect wilderness of saws.” Over sixty employees worked in the mills and in the various lumberyards that Weyerhaeuser and Denkmann owned or rented. Their clients included the Union Pacific Railway Company, which once placed a single order for 950,000 feet of bridge lumber, likely related to the construction of the transcontinental railroad.
Weyerhaeuser’s increased production capacity required enormous quantities of raw timber, but the supply system along the Mississippi River was a logistical nightmare. The lumber industry’s rapid growth had created a disorganized and segmented transportation network that included lumberjacks, landowners, log drivers, boom operators, raft pilots, upriver mill owners, and downriver Mississippi mill owners like Weyerhaeuser. Most of these components of the lumber industry operated independently of one another, held together through a series of contracts and uneasy relationships. Adding to this chaos were the vicissitudes of mother nature: Droughts impeded log driving; logjams slowed down supply; floods pushed logs outside the normal flow of a river, scattering them along the banks and surrounding forests for hundreds of miles. Weyerhaeuser, like all the Mississippi mill owners, was one of the final links in this concatenation of pine dealers and, consequently, had no means to guarantee his supply. As his capital investments and output capacity increased, his need to secure delivery of white pines from the great forests of the Lake States grew increasingly urgent.
The key to controlling the Mississippi River section of the region’s lumber trade was the 285-mile-long Chippewa River, which rose in northwestern Wisconsin some 30 miles south of Lake Superior. Of the four major watercourses that flowed southward through Wisconsin and emptied into the Mississippi, the Chippewa possessed the greatest commercial supply of white pine, an estimated 46.6 billion board feet in the forests that surrounded its headwaters. Geologists calculated that the river and its tributaries drained 34 percent of the entire timber region in Wisconsin. One contemporary expert in the lumber industry, in comparing the Chippewa to other parts of the Lake States, commented: “The Chippewa valley might be called a logger’s paradise, a very large part of its area being heavily forested with the finest quality of white pine timber, while rivers, streams, and lakes offered a network of excellent transportation facilities.”
In 1868, Weyerhaeuser traveled into the Chippewa Valley for the first time. After spending countless seasons contracting with every raft pilot and shady contractor along the Mississippi, he had decided to visit the source of his precious logs. Unlike most millmen,
he enjoyed the spartan life that the logging camps provided, always happy to spend a night in a plank bed or fight off the morning frost as he surveyed the woods. This comfort allowed him to venture deeply into the magnificent stands of pine along the Chippewa and gain a true appreciation of his industry’s potential. For the business to thrive, he realized, the increasingly well-capitalized mill owners needed to extend their reach all the way upriver into the source of the white pine, bypassing the chaos of middlemen that made sustained growth and consistent investment returns a near impossibility.
He started to experimentally purchase logs directly from contractors inside the Chippewa district. This allowed for enormous profits when the logs arrived, but the problems along the rivercourse continued to disrupt his supply. In particular, upriver mill owners—men operating in towns like Eau Claire and Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin—trapped Weyerhaeuser’s logs in their sorting booms, meaning his inventory might not arrive for several years, if at all. As Matthew Norton, a Mississippi mill owner and contemporary of Weyerhaeuser, explained: “For a mill man to have his capital tied up for that length of time meant certain ruin or disaster. Mr. Weyerhaeuser, however, was not inclined to give up an undertaking which seemed to him to have merit.”
The challenge was figuring out how to get logs purchased from the Chippewa forests through the chaos of the river, especially the obstructionist upriver mill owners. For Weyerhaeuser, the first step toward implementing order was to align his Mississippi colleagues, all of whom faced similar problems in log delivery. Unfortunately, these men tended to trust one another no more than their upriver antagonists. As Weyerhaeuser’s son later explained, “Many members of the Mississippi valley group were ready to fight one another upon the slightest pretext.”
Weyerhaeuser set his eyes on control of Beef Slough, a fifteen-mile-long spur channel that connected the Chippewa and Mississippi Rivers. It was an ideal site for all the Mississippi millmen to organize the millions of driven logs that made it through the upriver gauntlet. While a boom was already in place, few downriver men capitalized on it: The company that operated this boom was nearly insolvent after years of poor management, continued upriver obstruction, and insufficient capital reserves. Weyerhaeuser and Denkmann seized on this opportunity and in 1870 leased the boom for a two-year term, hoping that others would join them in the massive operation. They soon extended partnership offers to all the major Mississippi mill owners, and by year-end nearly every substantial player as far south as St. Louis had invested in Weyerhaeuser’s franchise.
